A Beautiful and strange otherness part iI
"We are rooted to place, to soil, to brambles and oaks, to the stories that have risen out of the night mist around an ancient fire, told by the old ones who no longer inhale the sweet scent of smoke or sage. To remember our eternal bond with this beautiful and strange otherness, is to recall our deep-time heritage, our mythic inheritance which is embedded in bone and breath. We become a burrowing badger of belonging, nosing our way into the soil, nuzzling the ground with sharp claws and an instinctual knowing that is determined to claim what is ours."
“Getting intimate with nature and knowing your own wild nature is
a matter of going face-to-face many times.”
-Gary Snyder
My last essay introduced a passage by Paul Shepard in which he said, “The grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.” His passage is worth repeating. It is good for us to hear his words again in hopes that some memory lingering in a deep ancestral pool will be stirred and help us recall our perennial kinship with the living earth.
I ended the previous article by posing a question: How do we re-enter the deep conversation with the Beautiful and Strange Otherness? Here are four practices to help us restore our connection with the wild world both inside out out.
………………………………………….
On those nights when the skies are clear, my wife and I sit outside and let our eyes fall into the bowl of darkness. Wrapped in the blanket of night, we take in the beauty of Andromeda, Cassiopeia and Albireo, feeling the larger home to which we belong. To come home is to remember our birthright; it is to recall that we are all indigenous to this stunning and wild world with its rumbling storms and lapis seas. Whatever fiction we ingested from a society that says we are separate from this animate world, we are, in fact, completely entangled with the beautiful and strange otherness that surrounds us. Our home is here, nestled with pine boughs and crows wings, rambunctious otters and rolling waves. Becoming attuned to this way of perceiving the earth is at the heart of what we are called to remember.
An Apprenticeship with Slowness. To notice these bonds of connection, however, we need to be moving in a way that is in accord with the rhythm of the soul. We need to move at what my mentor, Clarke Berry, called “geologic speed.” The first move we can make to help restore our connection with the beautiful and strange otherness, is to recall the soul’s primal rhythm. This rhythm was established over hundreds of thousands of years when we walked the earth. Our senses and minds were syncopated to streams and night skies, to times around the fire, to the long, patient wait of the hunter and listening to stories told by elders. We moved slowly and drank in the entire spectrum of life through our bodies. We need to take up an apprenticeship with slowness and remember this ancient mode of being.
Slowing down offers us an opportunity to establish bonds of intimacy with those around us: partners, children, friends and out into the wider terrain of the beautiful and strange otherness. Imagine creating a friendship with a birch tree, a raven or a stone. Let something capture your attention, call to you and engage you in an extended conversation until you and other become entangled. Become good friends rooted in the practice of familiarity and repetition. It takes time and repeated exposure to know another. I know when I walk through certain woods, how good it feels to come upon familiar trees that I immediately recognize as an old friend and we step into one another’s embrace and sit for a while in a restful silence falling deeper into our conversation.
Uncentering the Human. The practice of entering into the mind of another is what I call, “uncentering the human.” This is an ancient practice and an invitation to encounter the inner life of the beautiful and strange otherness. The thought comes from a poem called “Carmel Point,” by Robinson Jeffers, where he writes,
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we are made from.
\
This is the second move we can make to connect with the wild otherness that abounds around us. While psychology encourages us to get centered, the wild soul wants to experience the multi-centric world in which we live and breathe. To do so, as Jeffers notes, is to once again become confident by being rooted in an intimacy with the world. This is an amazing thought. What if our confidence was not based on some sense of personal power but more truly on the depth of intimacy we have with the animals, plants and trees that inhabit the watersheds around our homes? What if our sense of confidence comes from letting the ambling bear, the jumpy towhee and the curving arc of a feather touch our inner world, reminding us that we are part of it all.
Let yourself recall some place, some presence that has been with you all your life. In your mind, walk around it, touch it, and breathe in its scent. Come to know this other in a new way. After you feel you have fully contacted it, let your attention slip inside of it and become this other looking back at you. This totemic shift in awareness was something very familiar to our ancestors and offered an extended experience of identity. Notice how you feel. Be as particular as you can, feeling into the contours and movements of this being. And when you are ready, slip off this coat and come back to the one you recognize as yourself. Spend some time writing down what you encountered.
When we loosen the tight collar of civilization and step into the “culture of wildness” as storyteller Martin Shaw calls it, we recall the mutability of the self. We are part wolverine, part samba, part oak savannah. We come into the wider and wilder reach of our souls as we feel our branches stretching towards the sun, our roots penetrating the dark and mysterious soil. We feel ourselves as raindrops seeping into the dry ground. Our inheritance is this shape-shifting, storytelling, song singing existence that we occupy for a short while. When we uncenter our lives and feel ourselves falling into the embrace of the world, we remember our greater life, the one brimming with aliveness and connection. It is here, on this outcropping of awareness that the beautiful and strange otherness turns and looks back into our eyes. We shiver at this gaze, reminded that that same wildness is in us. Our identity widens and we once again find ourselves with talons and beak, fur and claws and taking in sunlight through a hundred thousand tongues of green. We remember dancing around firelight, singing songs and telling stories, ritually honoring this ancient bond between us and the beautiful and strange otherness.
Drinking the Tears of the World. How can we fail to love this achingly beautiful world when we are so completely jumbled together with it all? It is our myopia, our species-centric blindness that cuts us off from the actual world. To love this world, however, is to also know sorrow. Our grief is intimately connected to how far we allow our love to reach into the world. Think of those indigenous tribes willing to fight to the death to protect their homelands from being destroyed by mining or oil companies. They know their lives are inseparable from the animals, plants, rivers, spirits and ancestors of their lands. Our love was also meant to spill out into the world, into the forests, the rivers and cloudbanks. It was not meant to congeal in a single person or even a single species. As Thomas Berry said, “We have become a singular species talking only to itself.” When this happens—when the arc between our bodies and the great body of the earth breaks—we fall into an attachment disorder of epic proportions and everything suffers. Grief work is the third way we restore the bond with the world we inhabit.
The good news is we are supremely crafted to feel kinship with this breathing world. We are giant receptor sites for taking in the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the caress of a lover, the scent of rain. Paul Shepard said we are more like a pond surface than a closed system: We are permeable, exchanging the vibrancy of wind, pollen, color and fragrance. Life moves into us and through us like a breeze, affecting us and shaping us into a part of the terrain. We are inseparable from all that surrounds us. To mend the attachment disorder, we simply have to step out of our isolated room of self and into the wider embrace that awaits each of us. When we do, something magical happens. As we build our capacity for transparency and allow the world to enter us, our feelings of love blossom and an erotic leap occurs, bringing everything close to our heart. David Hinton writes in Hunger Mountain,
I become broken clouds drifting frontier passes, Star River, chrysanthemums and clotted dark…I wander the changing forms of my unborn identity, and with each new form I am more myself than ever…I become winged sky and the talon-torn kill caught in the open fields of snow, warm meat I tear from sinew and bone slice by slice, kill I leave among wing-prints when I flap away downslope into an early-winter thermal, all sky again bearing taut, well-fed wings up into open sky.
My heartbeats sound like dried grasses in gusty wind, like wingbeats and snowfall, like silent hunger-stares and pulsar, pulsar, pulsar. Heartbeat like footfall, silence and shelling, like cosmic background microwave radiation, wingbeat and snowmelt trickle-down ten-thousand-foot granite, shrapnel cries and silence, pulsar, dried grasses, my heartbeat heartbeat heartbeat heartbeat.
Something good always comes of me sooner or later; I have lungs and veins of quartz. I have ions, thorns and ancestors, tools, glistening vulvas, I have fruit, mitochondria, star-carbon and pollen, matted hair, blood, laughter. I have laughter, canyons, fire and feathers, death and sky. I have origins in the Triassic. I have memories, distances, enzymes, finds, fur, sediments, erections, wars, magnetic fields, hormones, hunger; have extinctions, words, antibodies, bark, hatred, chromosomes. I have silence, bone, ash, have sight, beauty, mitosis, silica, food chains, heartbeat, heartbeat, heartbeat, rivers, grief, beachglass, tongue, love. I have blowholes, continental plates, strata and sub-strata, shadow, nests, touch, sinew, silence, breath, peaks, milk, migrations, gills, lichen, others, roots, talons, centrioles and spindles, redshift, endorphins, flight, flight then and now, flight, flight.
Hinton goes on from there, but his words give a glimpse into the larger Self that awaits us when we greet the beautiful and strange otherness. Our loneliness subsides and our feelings of exile wane. Imagine this level of belonging when pulsars and chromosomes are all weaving themselves through you and are you. There is no sentimentality in his words, however. They include death and grief, war and hunger. It is all there as need be, and yet, we can feel the confidence that arises from such a wide reach of inclusion.
Entering the Storehouse of Myth. A fourth pathway leading us back to the tracks of the Beautiful and Strange Otherness, is through the sensuous world of story and myth. Here, spirit horses and shaggy bears of desire move through our inner landscape. In this craggy wilderness of the soul, we wrestle with longing and loneliness, power and love, danger and surprise meetings with strange allies. Our interior story merges with the great stories of all cultures and we see how these deep streams come from a shared ocean of experience. The myths of the world emerge from the earth, from the great fertile ground beneath our feet. Becoming familiar with this rich storehouse of wisdom helps us feel our kinship with the wild earth and the deep rivers of culture.
We are being asked to dream, or more accurately, to become receptive to the dreaming earth and hear the lingering echoes of styles of being that are latent in our psychic lives. We are completely designed for a life of soul and community, that twining trail through the thicket of intimacy and sovereignty. At times we must crawl on our hands and knees to recover the trail, but it is there, rooted in body and psyche, anchored by ancestors and the land—those perennial roots that hold us close to one another and to the singing soil. The most encouraging news is that we are not alone; we are surrounded by quivering aspens and the invisible hands of deep time ancestors. We possess a secret, wild language, living stories and songs that carry love and remind us of the vast landscapes of beauty that live in us.
We are rooted to place, to soil, to brambles and oaks, to the stories that have risen out of the night mist around an ancient fire, told by the old ones who no longer inhale the sweet scent of smoke or sage. To remember our eternal bond with this beautiful and strange otherness, is to recall our deep-time heritage, our mythic inheritance which is embedded in bone and breath. We become a burrowing badger of belonging, nosing our way into the soil, nuzzling the ground with sharp claws and an instinctual knowing that is determined to claim what is ours. The Beautiful and Strange Otherness that Shepard calls us to encounter, is within us and around us. Slow down, uncenter and forget about yourself for a moment, let the world find you, love what is nearby, share your grief with others, say thank you, learn the stories from where you live and from where your ancestors came, be a wee bit wild in your imagination, and come home.
a matter of going face-to-face many times.”
-Gary Snyder
My last essay introduced a passage by Paul Shepard in which he said, “The grief and sense of loss that we often attribute to a failure in our personality, is actually a feeling of emptiness where a beautiful and strange otherness should have been encountered.” His passage is worth repeating. It is good for us to hear his words again in hopes that some memory lingering in a deep ancestral pool will be stirred and help us recall our perennial kinship with the living earth.
I ended the previous article by posing a question: How do we re-enter the deep conversation with the Beautiful and Strange Otherness? Here are four practices to help us restore our connection with the wild world both inside out out.
………………………………………….
On those nights when the skies are clear, my wife and I sit outside and let our eyes fall into the bowl of darkness. Wrapped in the blanket of night, we take in the beauty of Andromeda, Cassiopeia and Albireo, feeling the larger home to which we belong. To come home is to remember our birthright; it is to recall that we are all indigenous to this stunning and wild world with its rumbling storms and lapis seas. Whatever fiction we ingested from a society that says we are separate from this animate world, we are, in fact, completely entangled with the beautiful and strange otherness that surrounds us. Our home is here, nestled with pine boughs and crows wings, rambunctious otters and rolling waves. Becoming attuned to this way of perceiving the earth is at the heart of what we are called to remember.
An Apprenticeship with Slowness. To notice these bonds of connection, however, we need to be moving in a way that is in accord with the rhythm of the soul. We need to move at what my mentor, Clarke Berry, called “geologic speed.” The first move we can make to help restore our connection with the beautiful and strange otherness, is to recall the soul’s primal rhythm. This rhythm was established over hundreds of thousands of years when we walked the earth. Our senses and minds were syncopated to streams and night skies, to times around the fire, to the long, patient wait of the hunter and listening to stories told by elders. We moved slowly and drank in the entire spectrum of life through our bodies. We need to take up an apprenticeship with slowness and remember this ancient mode of being.
Slowing down offers us an opportunity to establish bonds of intimacy with those around us: partners, children, friends and out into the wider terrain of the beautiful and strange otherness. Imagine creating a friendship with a birch tree, a raven or a stone. Let something capture your attention, call to you and engage you in an extended conversation until you and other become entangled. Become good friends rooted in the practice of familiarity and repetition. It takes time and repeated exposure to know another. I know when I walk through certain woods, how good it feels to come upon familiar trees that I immediately recognize as an old friend and we step into one another’s embrace and sit for a while in a restful silence falling deeper into our conversation.
Uncentering the Human. The practice of entering into the mind of another is what I call, “uncentering the human.” This is an ancient practice and an invitation to encounter the inner life of the beautiful and strange otherness. The thought comes from a poem called “Carmel Point,” by Robinson Jeffers, where he writes,
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we are made from.
\
This is the second move we can make to connect with the wild otherness that abounds around us. While psychology encourages us to get centered, the wild soul wants to experience the multi-centric world in which we live and breathe. To do so, as Jeffers notes, is to once again become confident by being rooted in an intimacy with the world. This is an amazing thought. What if our confidence was not based on some sense of personal power but more truly on the depth of intimacy we have with the animals, plants and trees that inhabit the watersheds around our homes? What if our sense of confidence comes from letting the ambling bear, the jumpy towhee and the curving arc of a feather touch our inner world, reminding us that we are part of it all.
Let yourself recall some place, some presence that has been with you all your life. In your mind, walk around it, touch it, and breathe in its scent. Come to know this other in a new way. After you feel you have fully contacted it, let your attention slip inside of it and become this other looking back at you. This totemic shift in awareness was something very familiar to our ancestors and offered an extended experience of identity. Notice how you feel. Be as particular as you can, feeling into the contours and movements of this being. And when you are ready, slip off this coat and come back to the one you recognize as yourself. Spend some time writing down what you encountered.
When we loosen the tight collar of civilization and step into the “culture of wildness” as storyteller Martin Shaw calls it, we recall the mutability of the self. We are part wolverine, part samba, part oak savannah. We come into the wider and wilder reach of our souls as we feel our branches stretching towards the sun, our roots penetrating the dark and mysterious soil. We feel ourselves as raindrops seeping into the dry ground. Our inheritance is this shape-shifting, storytelling, song singing existence that we occupy for a short while. When we uncenter our lives and feel ourselves falling into the embrace of the world, we remember our greater life, the one brimming with aliveness and connection. It is here, on this outcropping of awareness that the beautiful and strange otherness turns and looks back into our eyes. We shiver at this gaze, reminded that that same wildness is in us. Our identity widens and we once again find ourselves with talons and beak, fur and claws and taking in sunlight through a hundred thousand tongues of green. We remember dancing around firelight, singing songs and telling stories, ritually honoring this ancient bond between us and the beautiful and strange otherness.
Drinking the Tears of the World. How can we fail to love this achingly beautiful world when we are so completely jumbled together with it all? It is our myopia, our species-centric blindness that cuts us off from the actual world. To love this world, however, is to also know sorrow. Our grief is intimately connected to how far we allow our love to reach into the world. Think of those indigenous tribes willing to fight to the death to protect their homelands from being destroyed by mining or oil companies. They know their lives are inseparable from the animals, plants, rivers, spirits and ancestors of their lands. Our love was also meant to spill out into the world, into the forests, the rivers and cloudbanks. It was not meant to congeal in a single person or even a single species. As Thomas Berry said, “We have become a singular species talking only to itself.” When this happens—when the arc between our bodies and the great body of the earth breaks—we fall into an attachment disorder of epic proportions and everything suffers. Grief work is the third way we restore the bond with the world we inhabit.
The good news is we are supremely crafted to feel kinship with this breathing world. We are giant receptor sites for taking in the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the caress of a lover, the scent of rain. Paul Shepard said we are more like a pond surface than a closed system: We are permeable, exchanging the vibrancy of wind, pollen, color and fragrance. Life moves into us and through us like a breeze, affecting us and shaping us into a part of the terrain. We are inseparable from all that surrounds us. To mend the attachment disorder, we simply have to step out of our isolated room of self and into the wider embrace that awaits each of us. When we do, something magical happens. As we build our capacity for transparency and allow the world to enter us, our feelings of love blossom and an erotic leap occurs, bringing everything close to our heart. David Hinton writes in Hunger Mountain,
I become broken clouds drifting frontier passes, Star River, chrysanthemums and clotted dark…I wander the changing forms of my unborn identity, and with each new form I am more myself than ever…I become winged sky and the talon-torn kill caught in the open fields of snow, warm meat I tear from sinew and bone slice by slice, kill I leave among wing-prints when I flap away downslope into an early-winter thermal, all sky again bearing taut, well-fed wings up into open sky.
My heartbeats sound like dried grasses in gusty wind, like wingbeats and snowfall, like silent hunger-stares and pulsar, pulsar, pulsar. Heartbeat like footfall, silence and shelling, like cosmic background microwave radiation, wingbeat and snowmelt trickle-down ten-thousand-foot granite, shrapnel cries and silence, pulsar, dried grasses, my heartbeat heartbeat heartbeat heartbeat.
Something good always comes of me sooner or later; I have lungs and veins of quartz. I have ions, thorns and ancestors, tools, glistening vulvas, I have fruit, mitochondria, star-carbon and pollen, matted hair, blood, laughter. I have laughter, canyons, fire and feathers, death and sky. I have origins in the Triassic. I have memories, distances, enzymes, finds, fur, sediments, erections, wars, magnetic fields, hormones, hunger; have extinctions, words, antibodies, bark, hatred, chromosomes. I have silence, bone, ash, have sight, beauty, mitosis, silica, food chains, heartbeat, heartbeat, heartbeat, rivers, grief, beachglass, tongue, love. I have blowholes, continental plates, strata and sub-strata, shadow, nests, touch, sinew, silence, breath, peaks, milk, migrations, gills, lichen, others, roots, talons, centrioles and spindles, redshift, endorphins, flight, flight then and now, flight, flight.
Hinton goes on from there, but his words give a glimpse into the larger Self that awaits us when we greet the beautiful and strange otherness. Our loneliness subsides and our feelings of exile wane. Imagine this level of belonging when pulsars and chromosomes are all weaving themselves through you and are you. There is no sentimentality in his words, however. They include death and grief, war and hunger. It is all there as need be, and yet, we can feel the confidence that arises from such a wide reach of inclusion.
Entering the Storehouse of Myth. A fourth pathway leading us back to the tracks of the Beautiful and Strange Otherness, is through the sensuous world of story and myth. Here, spirit horses and shaggy bears of desire move through our inner landscape. In this craggy wilderness of the soul, we wrestle with longing and loneliness, power and love, danger and surprise meetings with strange allies. Our interior story merges with the great stories of all cultures and we see how these deep streams come from a shared ocean of experience. The myths of the world emerge from the earth, from the great fertile ground beneath our feet. Becoming familiar with this rich storehouse of wisdom helps us feel our kinship with the wild earth and the deep rivers of culture.
We are being asked to dream, or more accurately, to become receptive to the dreaming earth and hear the lingering echoes of styles of being that are latent in our psychic lives. We are completely designed for a life of soul and community, that twining trail through the thicket of intimacy and sovereignty. At times we must crawl on our hands and knees to recover the trail, but it is there, rooted in body and psyche, anchored by ancestors and the land—those perennial roots that hold us close to one another and to the singing soil. The most encouraging news is that we are not alone; we are surrounded by quivering aspens and the invisible hands of deep time ancestors. We possess a secret, wild language, living stories and songs that carry love and remind us of the vast landscapes of beauty that live in us.
We are rooted to place, to soil, to brambles and oaks, to the stories that have risen out of the night mist around an ancient fire, told by the old ones who no longer inhale the sweet scent of smoke or sage. To remember our eternal bond with this beautiful and strange otherness, is to recall our deep-time heritage, our mythic inheritance which is embedded in bone and breath. We become a burrowing badger of belonging, nosing our way into the soil, nuzzling the ground with sharp claws and an instinctual knowing that is determined to claim what is ours. The Beautiful and Strange Otherness that Shepard calls us to encounter, is within us and around us. Slow down, uncenter and forget about yourself for a moment, let the world find you, love what is nearby, share your grief with others, say thank you, learn the stories from where you live and from where your ancestors came, be a wee bit wild in your imagination, and come home.